I'd guess it was because West Ham were synonymous with racism and hooliganism. This would have been around the time when you couldn't go to West Ham without encountering a National Front stall full of skinheads and at the time of 'Paki bashing' in Brick Lane, just around the corner from Daneford.

Hard to tell but I'd say half the school were West Ham and the rest supported spurs , Liverpool, Arsenal or Man UTD. I don't remember a single Chelsea supporter.

Chim - that sounds par for the course round the East End.Most of my lot went Stepney Green. I lived the other end of globe rd.One of my good mates went daneford but was prob flanagan's age. And it sounds like the blade merchant started off at Templars!

Flanagans a naturally funny cunt and good to see a local boy made good. Even if he is a 4b2.!Was mostly them and gooners in BG then.

Flanagan went to the same school as me, Daneford Boys, in Bethnal Green which was as rough as fuck.

He's older than me and would have been in the fourth year as I arrived at the school in my first year. I was in the same class as Michael Watson the boxer. As a measure of how rough the school was, Michael wasn't even the best fighter in my class, let alone the rest of the year.

A lot of boxers went through Daneford as we were just up the road from Repton and the only famous ex-pupils who weren't strictly boxers were the Kray brothers.

I managed to get expelled after a knife fight with one of those black kids who have a mental age of ten and the body of a 22 year-old. If you went to school back then I think every school had at least one. For some reason I've always appeared on those kids' radar and had to do something a bit drastic in response.

Daneford (and Bethnal Green itself) was SO grim that when I went to my next school in Upton Park I genuinely thought it was in the countryside as there were trees there.

Lay off Micky Flanagan will you? Even if he is a yid he's just about the only decent thing that ever came out of my Alma Mater.

Daneford has had a name change since we were there and continues to pump out solid citizens.

It's now called Bethnal Green Academy and I can say with immense pride that there is no finer school in Britain for shaping a local innocent child into a Jihadi bride and PRIME drone target.

I was there last Saturday, it kicked off in the upper tier. Left him a bit flustered momentarily. There was two lots of noise going on, audience reaction to material then the upper tier booing at the cunts. All in all a pretty shitty experience, couldn't get into it, as there were people continually getting for a booze, piss or line.